Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier Page 13

  Sideways to a strong wind in a narrowboat and you might as well leave the tiller and go below and have a cup of tea and wait for her to roll over the weir and end it all.

  On the old Phyllis May I might have stood a chance but I am slower with these new controls and we were flung into the pontoons across the basin and trapped there until night fell.

  * * *

  Monica and I and our Lucy, our Clifford and our Georgia wandered the halls of The Radfords: sunlight crowding through the tall windows. We were bruised by the break-up of the commune. Monica became depressed and more than once tried or pretended to run away, and the children suffered as her illness took hold. The psychiatric resources in Staffordshire were poor and we soldiered along as best we could. It was a long three years.

  One day I realized I could not cope and rang the lady who had been the children’s nanny when they were very young. Margaret left her current job that day and pitched in. The dear soul was typical of the people of Stone who worked with us in the house, the family, the business.

  The professional classes in the area were a different matter. There were a few first-class people but not many. While trimming my moustache my barber mentioned that my solicitor, the executor of my will, was in jail. Monica’s GP was giving her bad advice, making her depression worse, and I went to see him to complain. A week later his wife killed herself. A dental surgeon from North Staffordshire University Hospital charged me five grand for work that fell out. I delivered Georgia myself when our midwife went into hiding. My accountant began to play the stock market with my money. I will not even glance towards Stafford Hospital,4 with its twelve hundred unnecessary deaths, and patients lying in pain and filth and crying for water.

  I was trying myself to set up a professional practice and learn about planning and finish and I set high standards for myself and others and took all this hard. Oh cheer up, Darlington!

  As the saintly Margaret held the pass for the family I looked around – no money, a thirty-room house, three kids. But Research Associates had been chugging along. In fact I would have done better financially if I had never seen a biscuit factory. More work came in and I hired a couple of full-time staff. There was plenty of room in The Radfords.

  Sometimes it was sinister, like an old French film –

  Dans la5 vieille gare solitaire et glacée

  Deux formes ont tout à l’heure passé

  A man steps off the train and another man appears and they shake hands and speak softly and hurry off into the night towards the great house on the hill.

  Often it was cheerful, as when Clifford aged six opened the door of The Radfords one Friday evening, first of the month. You’ve come to read in our hayloft for Plan B,6 and you’re Roger McGough!

  How do you know I’m Roger McGough?7

  Because you are wearing the sweater you wore on Top of the Pops last night!

  Sometimes it was embarrassing, like sitting down to dinner with the poet George MacBeth. Sittting down to dinner with George MacBeth was not in itself necessarily embarrassing but this evening Monica presented him with a bowl of ratatouille. George had just written a poem against ratatouille so he was obliged to refuse the dish for artistic reasons. He was proud of his poem and read it that evening. When I had last met George in London he was dressed like a clerk – now he wore a huge moustache and lapels, like a dandy lecturer on the Open University.

  Usually it was convivial. The Scottish poets were particularly keen on Monica’s dandelion wine, which shone like mother-of-pearl and was crisp and clean, like a single blow to the chin.

  Hugh MacDiarmid explained to the audience that critical opinion had decided that there were three great twentieth-century poets8 in the English language – a Welshman, an Irishman and a Scotsman.

  Adrian Mitchell proved evenly matched to a bottle of rose hip wine which had somehow exceeded the physical limits of alcoholic strength imposed by nature.

  Dear Brian Patten – summer and I was late but I knew where you would be – asleep in the sun on the pavement outside Stafford station.

  Are you Jon Silkin the poet? Will you come and read in the hayloft at The Radfords? It must be wonderful to be rung up and asked if you are somebody the poet. Jon read the poem about his little son dying9 and the audience of thirty people wept for him and he wept anew.

  Dear Roy Fisher. Dear Adrian Henri and his latest teenager Carol Ann Duffy.10

  Screaming down the hill to Oulton with George Barker in my Morgan as he shouted his poems into the night. As a schoolboy I had loved his poem ‘Seal Boy’ above all the others in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and now here he was, being a poet with me at sixty miles an hour.

  I had converted our ruined stables to a reading room, reclaiming the raftered roof space, once the hayloft, with new floors and windows. I built an outside staircase up to the little door where they had swung out the hay into Nannygoat Lane. Lit with oil lamps and with beer crates for seating this was a grand setting for poetry. We got over seventy in once but the average was thirty-five. Downstairs in the interval we would sell Plan B publications and if anyone cared to make a donation to Plan B we would offer them a glass of home brew.

  Local poets would come out of the audience and read first and then the famous guest in the second half. Sometimes I would read with the local poets. Monica would sing on her own or with Steve Lewin – I remember ‘The Bells Of Rhymney’11 during the coal strike, and one night ‘Plaisir d’Amour’,12 the song she sang thirty years later when we were approaching Calais in the Phyllis May.

  I loved to hear the poets from the audience because they spoke from their hearts. I understood if they did not come again. They had read their poems; they had had their say; they had told us; they had let us know.

  The first Plan B publication was Dave Rowley’s Winter Poems, which included part of his ‘Music of the Mind’s Tibet’.

  Plan B was hard work, mostly for Monica, who administered it. After five years we would have been asking the same poets for the third time, so we closed it down.

  We pegged above ravenous ravines

  Our makeshift tents of Art

  We gained nothing but height

  Yes Dave, nothing but height – and wasn’t the view great!

  On holiday we planted our tent next to a young French couple who would lean out of their caravan at eleven in the morning and make drinking gestures. This convivial pair had two dogs – an Alsatian and a dachshund. The Alsatian was a peaceful creature, but the dachshund would fire a volley of barks at every opportunity. Prévert is a small dog, explained Louis, who thinks he is a big dog.

  Edward Heath was a small dog who thought he was a big dog – a bullying effeminate who promised and threatened and then backed off. The fool who index-linked public sector pay when inflation was heading for 20 per cent. The dolt who antagonized the miners when the country could not afford to buy oil. The oaf who decreed that Research Associates could put its lights on for only three days a week.

  RA sought out contracts from industry and government to answer these questions –

  What is the size of our market, how is it divided between us and our competitors, and what is the sales potential of our products?

  What do our customers want and how good are we at providing it compared to our competitors?

  Within these questions is all the law and the prophets. RA would take them on anywhere in the world, but no one was asking.

  We sat around by the light of the Plan B oil lamps, working through the scraps and shreds of business we had pulled in before the oil shock closed down the phones; staying alive, doing the best we could, waiting for the wind to change, looking for a sign.

  Dear lemming crouched in your burrow in Stone

  My beloved colleagues in the Revenue and the social services have been sending you questionnaires for some time about your house and your activities and have been passing the results to me. So we know all about you and your obscene practices. You are a wretched businessman and you have
been conducting your business in your house. Do you not realize, you little swine, that a house is for living in and you have no permission to do anything else in it. You can eat and you can reproduce yourself and make model aeroplanes and that’s about it. What did we fight the war for if it is not to keep the power in the hands of the council so we can stop everything else. And furthermore I understand you have a bigger house than me which is not fair as I am more intelligent and well-intentioned than you and work myself half to death. I think you are probably rich and a Tory and in the thirties my parents had to endure the Means Test applied by people like you.

  You must stop this business nonsense at once – put all your equipment out on the lawn and send home the staff whom you abuse so cruelly. If you do not I will have no alternative but to send in the planning police, who will rape your wife and kill your children and barbecue your dogs on the lawn.

  Yours hatefully

  A prat from the council planning department

  Dear A prat from the council planning department

  How enchanting to hear from you, and how refreshing to feel that the council is protecting us from overstepping the mark when our enthusiasm bears us away. In the coolness of your office you must see things so clearly. Your power is so great and we are indeed blessed that your Christ-like compassion colours all the desperate decisions you have to make.

  My wretched business is only some modest office equipment and a few staff, some of them part-time and some absent in the field, and sometimes my little daughter sticks down envelopes if she gets home early from school. We have twenty rooms unused and we can use this space to the benefit of all. Should the flow of business ever interfere with the environment in any way I will at once decamp and set up offices in town. I am deeply sensitive to the need to follow planning laws, which I realize have been designed to make sure that the individual does not do things that would make them richer than you.

  I would only mention that my little firm carries out research to assist British firms in exporting. One cannot help asking is your time well spent hampering and frustrating a firm that is at the cutting edge of developments abroad for British business. We are entering a recession and unemployment is at a high level already. The press would make a fine meal of an export firm destroyed by bastards in the council planning office.

  As I say, the moment my firm begins to be a burden on the environment I will move it, and until then

  Fuck you

  Terry Darlington

  Research Associates ran in The Radfords for thirty years, and carried out a thousand studies in forty countries.

  Ten years after the exchange above, Downing Street asked Research Associates to carry out a study identifying barriers to business.

  Burdens on Business was published by the Department of Trade and Industry in March 1985, foreword by Norman Tebbit. It recommended action to ‘cut planning burdens … and assist people in starting businesses in their own homes’.

  * * *

  We left Stone on one foot – tired from farewell dinners, our mushrooms unpolished, our front fender askew, my eyes hurting but Oh hell let’s just go – we won’t learn about the north by sitting in Stone. We have delayed once because of a second attack of shingles and we have missed April on the cut. Perhaps things will straighten as we go south.

  South? Ah you picked that up – yes, south down the Trent and Mersey Canal and down and down and round and round in a great curve and off the canal and on to the Trent, which is not for long the little river that runs through Stoke and Stone. It turns into a beast more powerful than the Thames and if we are very lucky and it does not devour us it will swing round and deliver us squarely into Yorkshire from the rear. There we may feast on pudding and gravy and fish from Grimsby with golden batter that is so crisp and sweet that none gets left for Jim and Jess.

  Let us bless the fact that we do not have to go north again and slog up the deep locks of Stone and through derelict Stoke, where lovely people hang on in their dying rose-coloured terraces. We do not have to break our hearts on the locks of Heartbreak Hill. No, we go down my Happy Valley, the Trent Valley, with a lock and a pub every five miles and the skies that enslaved me as a young man when I came from London.

  We missed the first impatience of spring but as the air warmed the white May flowers looked to my tired eye like cumulus drawn down on to the cut, and the perfume filled my body with a sweet opiate, taking away pain.

  And the trees, the leaves just unwrapped, embraced the waterway with their green generosity.

  Jess has decided she doesn’t like the engine and when Monica is driving she sticks close to me, panting. Before she came to us her name was Cling. Her mum was Araldite (rhymes with Aphrodite) and her dad the faithful Velcro. Cling sticks close to my right leg, or fastens her nose to the back of my knee. If I sit down she takes up her default position, which is standing between my legs with her arms around my neck.

  In Rugeley we walked through the squares and flowers and ate a full English breakfast in the market, as we always do. Then we sailed the long pound through flat country lovely with trees and new crops, to Wood End Lock. There we have a secret place with metal piles where we can fix our mooring chains, a place unknown to all except the other people who moor there.

  In the autumn two miles of leaves fall above Wood End Lock. They drift south until the lock stops them and the canal becomes a soup of leaves. This disables the propellers of narrowboats and you are sailing on treacle. Entering Wood End Lock in the autumn requires great patience and a packed lunch.

  Jim and Jess love the towpath down to Fradley. From time to time Jess cuts off left into the field to hunt for rabbits but so far she has come back and we process down the cathedral of trees to the Swan.

  When Jim was a puppy we took him to the Swan. Two years later we took him to Fradley Junction again. He pulled us to the Swan, and straight through the door to the bar with the scratchings.

  In Alrewas there is a house covered in wisteria, like my room in college. When you brush by on the pavement it smells like everything you have ever loved.

  We stayed a few days while I tried to get my balance. I had become fat – but the booze gave me an evening without pain and it is hard to exercise when you are junked up and don’t see very well.

  The steps up on to the stern from the interior of the boat were strait and steep. Even Jim baulked at them. I pulled and heaved and got around, but barely.

  My painkillers made me feel dopey, but I could drive the PM2 as long as nothing unusual came along.

  Like the boat at Alrewas. A narrowboat head on has a small profile – and a black one coming out of the shade is nearly invisible. I crashed into reverse and stopped a foot from it and sidled by in a maelstrom of foam muttering apologies and waving.

  Next the bridge. There were things sticking out of the water on the starboard side. They were black and sort of like ducks. I focused on them and we got closer. Ducks, funny ducks. What funny ducks, goodness me. Funny black ducks, funny shapes.

  Monica was on the towpath – TERRY, WRONG ARCH!

  Then I saw the big notice telling me to keep to port. Strange, it was such a big notice – should have seen it really.

  I gave up the tiller and tried to get down from the back counter into the bedroom cabin. But the step is steep and I didn’t seem to be able to carry my own weight. I got a grip with my arms and elbows but my knees gave way and I collapsed on the floor in a heap of wrangling legs.

  In Willington I told Monica that I would not patronize the ice machine this evening – would she like to join me in seeking out a good pub?

  No, you go, leave me with the dogs.

  There were three pubs in the village. The first was big and black and chrome and clean and nearly empty, because it was early, and the staff were moving about restlessly as if a great threat was closing in. My pint wasn’t bad, but this did not feel like a pub to me, and who knows what terrible people would come in – men with Range Rovers and loud voices, or fat
women with leggings and visible panty lines.

  The next pub was small and brown and stained and there were two men at the bar. Just one brand of bitter on sale. I sat down and one of the men walked out. Something we said? I offered to the other guy. He thought that was quite funny and tipped his hat to me as he walked out. The barmaid had gone, and soon I had gone too.

  I don’t often visit three pubs in an evening but I knew the third pub would be OK because the others between them did not provide what a village needs. Have you noticed the way it works? Good pub, bad pub, good town, bad town, and so the world balances itself.

  The third pub looked like a pub – there may have been timbers. I walked in.

  Terry, shouted a man at the bar. Terry, shouted another. My God, it’s you.

  They came towards me holding out their hands. It’s you, isn’t it?

  I could think of no way to deny it.

  Read both your books, said the first man.

  Read both your books, said the second. My wife wet herself. Look everyone, it’s the chap who. It’s him. Where’s Jim?

  Through our journey so many people seemed to know who we were, and were keen to compliment me on my books and call me Terry and be my friend. The more verminous the boater the more likely he was to call out as he passed. When we moored fans hammered on the boat. Some asked if we found them intrusive.

  No, we loved it.

  * * *

  I pulled up my Union Jack knickers and adjusted my bridal dress. I wore Union Jack socks and a tiara of ivy and field flowers. My son Clifford took my arm. He wore large plastic ears.

  It was the fancy dress competition on our campsite in Cornwall the day Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer got married, and modesty cannot prevent me recording that we won.

  Our family drove to Cornwall four times in our VW camper-van towing a trailer tent. I do not remember it raining there.

  We made up jokes and rhymes and stories to help pass the miles. Little Georgia was strong with the light verse.

  There are two types of anteater

  The spiny and the not